What’s the point? This was the question posed to me this weekend. Why do we continue to run teachers’ writing groups? Why do people continue to come to these groups? And what prevents people from coming? There are so many pressures. So much paperwork that teaching must take a back seat. The world of teaching writing is flooded with the quick fix, the deceptive formula that seems at first to be principled and easy to manage and then transmogrifies: what seemed like a creative solution becomes the shackles that weigh us all, teachers and children, down. The new criteria for the assessment of writing forgets that writing might entail affect and the development of thought and forces painting by numbers. A child may fail to meet expected standards for the want of a colon. Can we set rats in a maze, however aesthetically pleasing, however dainty the bait, and come up with a definitive answer? No.

We arrive at a group. We are glad to see each other. That is part of it. We catch up. How has it been? We hear about the five year old who draws all the time and who is patient, waiting for her teacher to find space for her to speak her stories. We smile at the success of an undergraduate, returning to share it with the A level teacher who first made for him a space. We admire the maps and imagine the classroom where there is space for written adventures. And we begin with words: chick pea; carbuncle; Hartlepool; Ebenezer; indigestion; alfalfa. Sometimes it is hard even to let words enter the head - or we find ourselves editing those out. What can be shared? And then longer writing: pen meeting the page, words reminding us of beer drunk from a bottle, mist on a hillside, a grandfather’s hands, apples fallen and bruised, a wasp hovering.

Sometimes we cannot get started. It is just not working. We discover ways to get round that resistance - or may be not. Sometimes what we write ambushes us with tears. Sometimes we find ourselves not wanting to stop. Then reading aloud. We hear our words on the air and in the sounding board of our bodies. We sense our listeners’ careful attention, the quietness, the chuckle, the breath of appreciation. And we find ourselves absorbed by the writing of others: the way that phrase makes so much sense or those words make us see things differently. We try things out, we learn from others, we are daunted, we are helpless with laughter.

There is the writing. And then there is the teaching of writing. The conversation expands. If we have been working in pairs, we extend to the larger group. Talk moves beyond, in and out of the writing of the moment to other experiences of writing, to reading, to things that have happened in our writing classrooms. There is a quietness and a lightness. A warmth. All these experiences become part of our deep understandings. What we learn when we are writing as one of a group returns with each of us to the places where we teach. It has changed us and it changes how we teach. For each of us the change is different and it us hard to pin down. Whitney and Friedrich’s (2013) exploration of what they termed the legacy of the NWP USA identified three ‘orientations’ of NWP teachers:

towards writing,

towards writers

and towards the teaching of writing.

They suggest that these orientations transcend any particular set of lessons or strategies that a teacher might use but allow teachers to meet head on the new knowledge and practice they encounter over the course of their careers in and to come to terms with it in a principled way.

This capacity to work in an informed way with what is happening in schools and classrooms is evident amongst writing teachers we know. There may be frustrations, even moments of despair, but most of us find our teaching of writing is grounded in our meetings with other writing teachers and in our own writing there. Writing teachers seem to be developing a knowledge of what it means to learn to write that comes from deep within themselves. Whether this is part of what is meant by their orientations or whether it is something other, we are still learning. It is a slow business. The power of the community, others engaged in the same venture is important. The writing, the talking into and out of the writing, the quiet space of the writing group: these things are fundamental to teachers’ sense of agency in the writing classroom.

Social media reminds me that at this time last year we were still writing Introducing Teachers’ Writing Groups. It was both painful and exhilarating and we learned in the course of writing it. It was a staging post. It was designed as an introduction. Now we are looking to dig deeper. What does it mean to be a ‘writing teacher’? I am thinking again about James Britton’s optimistic hope for those ‘quiet processes and small circles’ through which ‘vital and transforming events’ can take place. Do be in touch with us if you would like to be part of this conversation.

Reference: Whitney, A. E. & Friedrich, L. (2013) ‘Orientations for the Teaching of Writing: A Legacy of the National Writing Project.’ in Teachers College Record Volume 115, July 2013 1 -37.

On Friday 15th April we met in UEA to celebrate the publication of Introducing Teachers’ Writing Groups. The book launch at the English and Media Centre in January had been a pleasure and was attended by group leaders and writers from London and across the country, from points south, north and west. Friday’s celebration honoured the contribution that East Anglian teachers have made to the thinking behind the book and introduced it to others who are not yet involved.

Something that pleases me greatly is that the book is filled with teachers’ voices. Their experiences and their thinking contribute to the whole and continue to do so. Writing teachers groups provide a space for teachers to write together and therefore to think together; to discover with and from each other more about writing and the teaching of writing and to articulate those discoveries. Our groups are not about quick fixes or single solutions. They are, however, about strength; the strength of community and slow thought, of mutual respect and admiration and the quietness of writing together. They are about wild laughter and human sympathy, and endless curiosity and inquiry. Writing groups create their own webs of solidarity where much is shared and explored.

During the final meeting of each year, I ask Writing Teachers at UEA to write for twenty minutes or so with the following sentence starter: “This year I have learned about teaching writing......” and I take away copies of what everyone writes. The results always move me. In these words can be found evidence of the individual and the community, the writer and the writing, the way that principles are emerging and dilemmas are wrangled. At this celebration we showed a presentation drawn from teachers’ words alongside images of how we work together. A line that gave me pause for thought when I read it in the summer was: ‘This year I have become a writing teacher.’ It was written by a teacher who has been attending the group for about three years and whom I regard to be a great writing teacher. She runs a very successful writing club at her school and thinks deeply about her teaching. And yet, only now did she consider herself ‘a writing teacher’.

It made me think how slow the process is of growing into teaching, despite current claims otherwise. And teaching writing is a particularly slow business. We can’t rush into it. We can keep working at it and as we write and think together, with each other and with our students, we gain a richer, more nuanced, more confident sense of what it is to learn to be a writer; what it is to be the teacher who is able to teach writing.

​I have so many things to blog about that I am spoilt for choice, so I have decided to share two things that I have seen this weekend. The others can wait. Many of you may already know that April is National Write a Poem Month. NaPoWriMo is an offshoot of the better known NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month which happens in November, when the challenge is to write a novel in a month. One of our Writing Teachers from the UEA group has been doing this every year alongside the children in her class.

For the month of April,the challenge is to write a poem a day. The NaPoWriMo websitehttp://www.napowrimo.net issues daily writing prompts and, although there is no compulsion to use these prompts, they can set you going. Even if you don’t take up the challenge, the prompts are fun and mix the playful with the more challenging. Today’s prompt was to write a ‘book spine’ poem, using the titles from your book shelves but yesterday’s was to include ‘something dangerous’, that is, something difficult to say, in the poem. Essentially, at a poem a day the emphasis is on playfulness and experimentation.

My attention was drawn to the project by Marion Leeper, who is a Cambridge based story teller and a member of the writing group that Simon and I belong to. The NaPoWriMo website encourages writers to blog their poems. Here is a link to Marion’s poetry website which reflects her love of the Cambridgeshire landscape and her deep knowledge of storytelling which rise up through all that she writes. https://walkingthecamriver.wordpress.com

There can be something quite pleasurable about writing to order in this way. In his Cambridge Introduction to Creative Writing, David Morley sets 31 titles for a half hourly daily writing improvisation. Simon and I had a go at this - he much better and more tolerant of it than me, I have to say. To write for half an hour with a starting point that did not always feel attractive at the start was an excellent challenge. Sometimes it made me want to scream, but it also threw up some surprises that pleased. It forced me to overcome the editor in the head; to sidestep what I usually write about and to discover new ways of putting words together.

Perhaps you are already taking part in the poetry writing month - or maybe you will decide to do so now. Perhaps this is something that you could do with those you teach? If you have a blog showcasing your daily poems, do be in touch. We would love to see what you are doing and share your posts.

In Saturday’s Guardian, Andrew Motion wrote about his English teacher, Peter Way, who died last month. His tribute was accompanied by a poem that struck a chord with me and which made me think of writing teachers. It made me think of the writing teachers I know who live alongside their students, who listen attentively, who do not impose, who are kind, and generous in their sharing of what they know about writing; teachers who know that ‘they [students] need us to facilitate and encourage their finding their voices and that we need to teach them to have stronger and stronger voices.....’